Today, increasing numbers of businesses are migrating their applications, and sometimes even their data to the web. Unfortunately, such migrations expose more of their sensitive data and applications to hackers. One common approach used by hackers to attack a business employs botnets.
Briefly, a bot is an abbreviation of the word “robot.” Robots typically are computer programs that are configured to perform actions on behalf of a remote user. When a number of these bots are connected to a single channel and receive commands from the remote user, they form what is known as a botnet.
Botnets and drones have become common household names lately as a result of computing security related vulnerabilities, which are often exploited by opportunistic, malicious attackers. Traditional network devices such as firewalls, proxy servers, and the like, are becoming less effective disrupting these kinds of attacks using conventional defenses. Methods that may have once been effective in disrupting these sorts of attacks, such as targeting synchronization (SYN) floods at the sites waging the attacks, are becoming less effective to botnet attacks. Moreover, many of the attackers appear to be targeting the most vulnerable or weakest points in a business' network. These weakest points typically involve computing devices configured with processing intensive applications. Because traditional approaches have found it difficult to distinguish between legitimate database operations from unauthorized database operations, these applications and their data remain exposed to attacks. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that aspects of the current invention are directed.